Infoporn: how free apps eavesdrop on your private life

Click the graphic at the top of the article to explore it in more detail

You are looking at a map of all the permissions you have given six popular smartphone apps – Facebook, Twitter, Gmail, Instagram, Skype and Viber. Instagram can use your camera and microphone to record audio and take pictures and video, without asking you first. Gmail can read and modify your phone contacts. Viber has your precise GPS location at all times. Facebook can read all your text messages.

“These are permissions that the apps require you to grant them before they are installed,” says Vladan Joler, the data wrangler behind the visualisation and director of the Serbian non-profit SHARE Foundation, which campaigns for internet freedoms. “The purpose of this visual is to show, in a clear way, what smartphone users agree to when they click 'yes' on terms and conditions.”

Advertisement

Click the gallery below to view more infoporn

Infoporn: WIRED handpicks the web's best infographics

+16

+15

+14

Read the map from the centre outwards: starting with the application itself, examine the list of permissions each requires, followed by what these permissions really imply, ranked by how intrusive they are. “Even with just these six apps, you are giving away pretty much all the metadata that exists on your phone,” Joler says. “They have permission to access sensitive information such as who you called, when you called them and how long the call lasted.”

His goal is to remind you that every free app makes money by collecting your personal data and creating a profile of you that can be monetised and sold on to third parties. “Mobile phones have hugely expanded the intimacy and quality of the information they gather,” says Joler.

This article was first published in the August 2015 issue of WIRED magazine